No rush to reform

No rush to reform
Scripps-Howard: If Congress holds to its overloaded schedule, it will have only 18 legislative days before it knocks off, tentatively Oct. 1, to go home and run for re-election.
Yet in that time, with everything else on its hands -- like funding the government for the next year -- there is a growing determination to enact something like the 9/11 commission's recommendations on reorganizing the structure of U.S. intelligence.
Basically, the commission called for a single national intelligence czar with budget and personnel control over intelligence-gathering now spread over some 15 agencies. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., recently proposed an overhaul along the same lines.
The idea has a lot of superficial appeal, and this may be why Congress is in such a hurry to act on it; lawmakers can go home and tell the voters that they have "done something" about national security.
Wait until next year
The congressional leadership should put the brakes on this proposal and leave an intelligence overhaul, if one is truly needed, until the new Congress takes office next year.
The 9/11 commission is not the final word on how U.S. intelligence should be collected and analyzed. The intelligence agencies, the capital's national-security think tanks and the large community of former agency heads are deeply divided about the wisdom of a single czar. The Bush White House itself seems skeptical of the plan.
Finally, since 9/11 and after Afghanistan and Iraq, many reforms have been instituted, and it would be worth waiting to see how these have worked.